Here is what science has to say about why geese fly in V formation.
I found it to be fascinating and inspiring.
As each bird flaps its wings, it creates an uplift for the bird immediately following.
By flying in V formation the whole flock adds at least 71% greater flying range than if each bird flew on its own.
When a goose falls out of formation, it suddenly feels the drag and resistance of trying to go it alone ... and quickly gets back into formation to take advantage of the lifting power of the bird in front.
When the Head Goose gets tired, it rotates back in the wing and another goose flies point.
Geese honk from behind to encourage those up front to keep up their speed.
Finally...and this is important...when a goose gets sick, or is wounded by gunshots, and falls out of formation, two other geese fall out with that goose and follow it down to lend help and protection. They stay with the fallen goose until it is able to fly, or until it dies; only then do they launch out on their own, or with another formation to catch up with their group.
Wouldn't it be great if we could learn to have the sense of a goose, and stand by each other like that.
Saturday, 5 November 2011
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
Love and forgiveness go together. In order to love ourselves and others we need to forgive ourselves and others for hurts real and imaginary. The course in miracles tells us all hurts are imaginary and whether or not you agree with this or not, the fact remains, that you suffer when you feel hurt.
Exercise Dissolving Resentment.
There is an Emmet Fox exercise for dissolving resentment that I have found to be really powerful in freeing up old hurts and allowing me to feel more loving and energetic.
Sit quietly, and close your eyes, allow your mind and body to relax.
Then imagine yourself sitting in a darkened theater, and in front of you is a darkened stage. On that stage place the person you resent the most. It could be someone in the past or present , living or dead.
When you see (or feel) this person clearly , visualise goods thing happening to this person - things that would be meaningful to him. See him smiling and happy. Hold this image for a few minutes and then let it fade away.
Next step, as this person leaves the stage, put yourself up there. See good things happening to you. See yourself smiling and happy.
Be aware that the abundance of the universe is available to all of us.
Practice this exercise daily for a few weeks and I guarantee you will feel a big change in your energy , and wonderful increase in your happiness.
Exercise Dissolving Resentment.
There is an Emmet Fox exercise for dissolving resentment that I have found to be really powerful in freeing up old hurts and allowing me to feel more loving and energetic.
Sit quietly, and close your eyes, allow your mind and body to relax.
Then imagine yourself sitting in a darkened theater, and in front of you is a darkened stage. On that stage place the person you resent the most. It could be someone in the past or present , living or dead.
When you see (or feel) this person clearly , visualise goods thing happening to this person - things that would be meaningful to him. See him smiling and happy. Hold this image for a few minutes and then let it fade away.
Next step, as this person leaves the stage, put yourself up there. See good things happening to you. See yourself smiling and happy.
Be aware that the abundance of the universe is available to all of us.
Practice this exercise daily for a few weeks and I guarantee you will feel a big change in your energy , and wonderful increase in your happiness.
Friday, 28 October 2011
Seeing the world as oneself - or as a lover - transforms ordinary reality and provides a greater sense of purpose.
by Joanna Macy
It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up - release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us, our love for the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until we are enlightened.
To view the world as lover is to look at the world as a most intimate and gratifying partner. We find some of the richest expressions of our erotic relationship to the world in Hinduism, for example in Krishna worship, but this erotic affirmation of the phenomenal world is not limited to Hinduism. Ancient Goddess religions, now being explored (at last!) carry it too, as do strains of Sufism and the Kabbalah, and Christianity has its tradition of bridal mysticism.
It also occurs outside the religious metaphor. A poet friend of mine went through a period of such personal loss that she was catapulted into extreme loneliness. Falling apart into a nervous breakdown, she went to New York City and lived alone. She walked the streets for months until she found her wholeness again. A phrase of hers echoes in my mind: "I learned to move in the world as if it were my lover."
Another Westerner who sees the world as lover is Italian storyteller Italo Calvino. In his little book, Cosmicomics, he describes the evolution of life from the perspective of an individual who experienced it from the beginning, even before the Big Bang. The chapter I want to recount begins with a sentence from science: "Through the calculations begun by Edwin P. Hubble on the galaxies' velocity of recession, we can establish the moment when all the universe's matter was concentrated in a single point, before it began to expand in space."
"We were all there, where else could we have been?" says Calvino's narrator, Qfwfq, as he describes his experience. "We were all in that one point - and, man, was it crowded!" Given the conditions, irritations were almost inevitable. See, in addition to all those people, "you have to add all the stuff we had to keep piled up in there: all the material that was to serve afterwards to form the universe ... from the nebula of Andromeda to the Vosges Mountains to beryllium isotopes. And on top of that we were always bumping against the Z'zu family's household goods: camp beds, mattresses, baskets. ..."
So there were, naturally enough, complaints and gossip, but none ever attached to Mrs. Pavacini. (Since most names in the story have no vowels, I have given her a name we can pronounce.) "Mrs. Pavacini, her bosom, her thighs, her orange dressing gown," the sheer memory of her fills our narrator
"with a blissful, generous emotion. ... The fact that she went to bed with her friend Mr. DeXuaeauX, was well-known. But in a point, if there's a bed, it takes up the whole point, so it isn't a question of going to bed but of being there, because anybody in the point is also in the bed. So consequently it was inevitable that she was in bed with each of us. If she'd been another person, there's no telling all the things that might have been said about her. ..."
This state of affairs could have gone on indefinitely, but something extraordinary happened. An idea occurred to Mrs. Pavacini: "Oh boys, if only I had some room, how I'd like to make some pasta for you!" Here I quote in part from my favorite longest sentence in literature, which closes this particular chapter in Calvino's collection:
"And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward over the great mound of flour and eggs ... while her arms kneaded and kneaded, white and shiny with oil up to the elbows, and we thought of the space the flour would occupy and the wheat for the flour and the fields to raise the wheat and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields ... of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Pavacini was uttering those words: "... ah, what pasta, boys!" the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light years and light centuries and billions of light millennia and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe ... and she dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Pavacini, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys, the pasta I could make for you!" a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same time the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Pavacinis scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss."
But is she lost? Or is she equally present, in every moment, her act of love embodied in every unfolding of this amazing world?
Whether we see it as Krishna or as Mrs. Pavacini, that teasing, loving presence is in the monsoon clouds and the peacock's cry that heralds the monsoon, and in the plate of good pasta.
For when you see the world as lover, every being, every phenomenon, can become - if you have a clever, appreciative eye - an expression of that ongoing, erotic impulse. It takes form right now in each one of us and in everyone and everything we encounter - the bus driver, the clerk at the checkout counter, the leaping squirrel.
As we seek to discover the lover in each lifeform, you can find yourself in the dance of rasa-lila, sweet play, where each of the milkmaids who yearned for Krishna finds him magically at her side, her very own partner in the dance. The one beloved has become many, and the world itself her lover.
by Joanna Macy
It is my experience that the world itself has a role to play in our liberation. Its very pressures, pains, and risks can wake us up - release us from the bonds of ego and guide us home to our vast, true nature. For some of us, our love for the world is so passionate that we cannot ask it to wait until we are enlightened.
To view the world as lover is to look at the world as a most intimate and gratifying partner. We find some of the richest expressions of our erotic relationship to the world in Hinduism, for example in Krishna worship, but this erotic affirmation of the phenomenal world is not limited to Hinduism. Ancient Goddess religions, now being explored (at last!) carry it too, as do strains of Sufism and the Kabbalah, and Christianity has its tradition of bridal mysticism.
It also occurs outside the religious metaphor. A poet friend of mine went through a period of such personal loss that she was catapulted into extreme loneliness. Falling apart into a nervous breakdown, she went to New York City and lived alone. She walked the streets for months until she found her wholeness again. A phrase of hers echoes in my mind: "I learned to move in the world as if it were my lover."
Another Westerner who sees the world as lover is Italian storyteller Italo Calvino. In his little book, Cosmicomics, he describes the evolution of life from the perspective of an individual who experienced it from the beginning, even before the Big Bang. The chapter I want to recount begins with a sentence from science: "Through the calculations begun by Edwin P. Hubble on the galaxies' velocity of recession, we can establish the moment when all the universe's matter was concentrated in a single point, before it began to expand in space."
"We were all there, where else could we have been?" says Calvino's narrator, Qfwfq, as he describes his experience. "We were all in that one point - and, man, was it crowded!" Given the conditions, irritations were almost inevitable. See, in addition to all those people, "you have to add all the stuff we had to keep piled up in there: all the material that was to serve afterwards to form the universe ... from the nebula of Andromeda to the Vosges Mountains to beryllium isotopes. And on top of that we were always bumping against the Z'zu family's household goods: camp beds, mattresses, baskets. ..."
So there were, naturally enough, complaints and gossip, but none ever attached to Mrs. Pavacini. (Since most names in the story have no vowels, I have given her a name we can pronounce.) "Mrs. Pavacini, her bosom, her thighs, her orange dressing gown," the sheer memory of her fills our narrator
"with a blissful, generous emotion. ... The fact that she went to bed with her friend Mr. DeXuaeauX, was well-known. But in a point, if there's a bed, it takes up the whole point, so it isn't a question of going to bed but of being there, because anybody in the point is also in the bed. So consequently it was inevitable that she was in bed with each of us. If she'd been another person, there's no telling all the things that might have been said about her. ..."
This state of affairs could have gone on indefinitely, but something extraordinary happened. An idea occurred to Mrs. Pavacini: "Oh boys, if only I had some room, how I'd like to make some pasta for you!" Here I quote in part from my favorite longest sentence in literature, which closes this particular chapter in Calvino's collection:
"And in that moment we all thought of the space that her round arms would occupy moving backward and forward over the great mound of flour and eggs ... while her arms kneaded and kneaded, white and shiny with oil up to the elbows, and we thought of the space the flour would occupy and the wheat for the flour and the fields to raise the wheat and the mountains from which the water would flow to irrigate the fields ... of the space it would take for the Sun to arrive with its rays, to ripen the wheat; of the space for the Sun to condense from the clouds of stellar gases and burn; of the quantities of stars and galaxies and galactic masses in flight through space which would be needed to hold suspended every galaxy, every nebula, every sun, every planet, and at the same time we thought of it, this space was inevitably being formed, at the same time that Mrs. Pavacini was uttering those words: "... ah, what pasta, boys!" the point that contained her and all of us was expanding in a halo of distance in light years and light centuries and billions of light millennia and we were being hurled to the four corners of the universe ... and she dissolved into I don't know what kind of energy-light-heat, she, Mrs. Pavacini, she who in the midst of our closed, petty world had been capable of a generous impulse, "Boys, the pasta I could make for you!" a true outburst of general love, initiating at the same time the concept of space and, properly speaking, space itself, and time, and universal gravitation, and the gravitating universe, making possible billions and billions of suns, and planets, and fields of wheat, and Mrs. Pavacinis scattered through the continents of the planets, kneading with floury, oil-shiny, generous arms and she lost at that very moment, and we, mourning her loss."
But is she lost? Or is she equally present, in every moment, her act of love embodied in every unfolding of this amazing world?
Whether we see it as Krishna or as Mrs. Pavacini, that teasing, loving presence is in the monsoon clouds and the peacock's cry that heralds the monsoon, and in the plate of good pasta.
For when you see the world as lover, every being, every phenomenon, can become - if you have a clever, appreciative eye - an expression of that ongoing, erotic impulse. It takes form right now in each one of us and in everyone and everything we encounter - the bus driver, the clerk at the checkout counter, the leaping squirrel.
As we seek to discover the lover in each lifeform, you can find yourself in the dance of rasa-lila, sweet play, where each of the milkmaids who yearned for Krishna finds him magically at her side, her very own partner in the dance. The one beloved has become many, and the world itself her lover.
Thursday, 27 October 2011
Relax for a few minutes and feel the space around your body.
Feel the space above, below, in front, behind
and at the sides of your body. . . .
Relax even more and allow yourself to feel the presence
of your fingers. . . . .
The three dimensional presence of your fingers. . . .
Slow down and notice how your fingers feel. . . .
Now imagine what it would be like to feel the space between
your fingers . . . . .
Imagine what it would be like to feel the space between your
hands . . . . . .
Imagine feeling the space between your hands and the sides
of your body . . . . .
Relax, Relax , Relax into the feeling of space . . .
Notice how you feel when you have spent a few moments
focusing your attention on space or 'nothingness'.
According to Dr Fehmi (of Open Focus) when we pay attention
to space ,emptiness or silence the mind tends to relax.
I'm sure you will have noticed this while even reading the
exercise above.
These types of open focus exercises are of
great benefit to everybody who wants to learn to relax.
They are especially beneficial to those of us who also
practice tai chi.
The relaxed awareness of the spaces in and around
ones body awakens one to the aliveness of the spaces we
create and work with while practicing our tai chi.
Feel the space above, below, in front, behind
and at the sides of your body. . . .
Relax even more and allow yourself to feel the presence
of your fingers. . . . .
The three dimensional presence of your fingers. . . .
Slow down and notice how your fingers feel. . . .
Now imagine what it would be like to feel the space between
your fingers . . . . .
Imagine what it would be like to feel the space between your
hands . . . . . .
Imagine feeling the space between your hands and the sides
of your body . . . . .
Relax, Relax , Relax into the feeling of space . . .
Notice how you feel when you have spent a few moments
focusing your attention on space or 'nothingness'.
According to Dr Fehmi (of Open Focus) when we pay attention
to space ,emptiness or silence the mind tends to relax.
I'm sure you will have noticed this while even reading the
exercise above.
These types of open focus exercises are of
great benefit to everybody who wants to learn to relax.
They are especially beneficial to those of us who also
practice tai chi.
The relaxed awareness of the spaces in and around
ones body awakens one to the aliveness of the spaces we
create and work with while practicing our tai chi.
Wednesday, 26 October 2011
That Which is Looking
Only when you turn attention to awareness itself, there isn't anything behind it. That's what returning to the source means. It means that nothing is next. There's nothing behind it. With a thought there's always something behind it. There's always the awareness of thought. So awareness is behind it. With a feeling there's always something behind it. With the conditioned tendency there's always something behind it. There's always awareness behind everything that's perceivable. Everything that's thinkable. There's always something behind it: namely that awareness. Spirit.
To 'look within' doesn't mean to look for something really amazing to happen. To look for the states of consciousness to change. That's not what look within means. Have any of you looked within like that? I've spent so many hours looking within that way - not thousands, tens of thousands of hours looking within. And I was looking ... the same way we look outside. You know, like we're looking for something. And so you look inside. It's a great teaching, but then what do you do? You tend to look for stuff. Look for really groovy spiritual stuff to happen. Right? It's the same looking. It's not really different than looking for a million bucks, or a hot looking guy or gal or success. It's just looking for inner stuff. And there's a world of inner things and experiences, just like there's an outer world of things to look for.
But the inner world, it's not any more real or significant then the outer world. So to look within doesn't mean that, to look within in a way that you're looking for something. Looking for a treasure. It means to go to the root. And the root is the looking itself.
To turn within is to turn to that which is looking. So that we find out for ourselves that there isn't anybody that's looking! Looking is looking. There isn't someone there called 'me' that's behind awareness that's aware. Awareness is aware. It's the opposite: I'm not aware; awareness is aware of me. And this is quite a shock when you really come upon it!
This is really 'one without a second' as Ramana (Maharshi) used to say. That the self is one without a second. Without a second means: nothing behind it. No deeper return to go to. You've returned to your natural state. In Zen we used to call it 'taking the backward step.' We (generally) want to take the forward step: to pursue, to seek, to find. But the backward step is very simple ... return to what you are. Till that flash of recognition dawns, that awareness itself is what you are. Just like the flash of lightning in an empty sky - a spontaneous flash!
The easiest thing in spirituality is for it to become complex, instead of simple. But this is a very simple thing which is why it can penetrate so deeply. So quickly. So immediately.
--Adyashanti
Only when you turn attention to awareness itself, there isn't anything behind it. That's what returning to the source means. It means that nothing is next. There's nothing behind it. With a thought there's always something behind it. There's always the awareness of thought. So awareness is behind it. With a feeling there's always something behind it. With the conditioned tendency there's always something behind it. There's always awareness behind everything that's perceivable. Everything that's thinkable. There's always something behind it: namely that awareness. Spirit.
To 'look within' doesn't mean to look for something really amazing to happen. To look for the states of consciousness to change. That's not what look within means. Have any of you looked within like that? I've spent so many hours looking within that way - not thousands, tens of thousands of hours looking within. And I was looking ... the same way we look outside. You know, like we're looking for something. And so you look inside. It's a great teaching, but then what do you do? You tend to look for stuff. Look for really groovy spiritual stuff to happen. Right? It's the same looking. It's not really different than looking for a million bucks, or a hot looking guy or gal or success. It's just looking for inner stuff. And there's a world of inner things and experiences, just like there's an outer world of things to look for.
But the inner world, it's not any more real or significant then the outer world. So to look within doesn't mean that, to look within in a way that you're looking for something. Looking for a treasure. It means to go to the root. And the root is the looking itself.
To turn within is to turn to that which is looking. So that we find out for ourselves that there isn't anybody that's looking! Looking is looking. There isn't someone there called 'me' that's behind awareness that's aware. Awareness is aware. It's the opposite: I'm not aware; awareness is aware of me. And this is quite a shock when you really come upon it!
This is really 'one without a second' as Ramana (Maharshi) used to say. That the self is one without a second. Without a second means: nothing behind it. No deeper return to go to. You've returned to your natural state. In Zen we used to call it 'taking the backward step.' We (generally) want to take the forward step: to pursue, to seek, to find. But the backward step is very simple ... return to what you are. Till that flash of recognition dawns, that awareness itself is what you are. Just like the flash of lightning in an empty sky - a spontaneous flash!
The easiest thing in spirituality is for it to become complex, instead of simple. But this is a very simple thing which is why it can penetrate so deeply. So quickly. So immediately.
--Adyashanti
Monday, 24 October 2011
Here is this weeks lesson for the tai chi beginners.
Introductory Form Brush Knee and Push from Heartworker on Vimeo.
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